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Co-housing: One Solution to the Housing Crisis

Big Cities Cooperative Housing is a short documentary about co-housing experiments in Seoul South Korea and Lyons France.

In Seoul, where 70% of the population live in high rise apartment buildings, three families have pooled resources to buy a three story house. In addition to communal cooking and social space, each family has private living space. There is also a communal vegetable garden.

The “vertical village in Lyon was first build in 2005 by a group of families seeking a non-materialistic lifestyle – who found themselves priced out of the property market. The first housing cooperative in France, it’s been the inspiration for many similar co-housing projects in Europe and Quebec, as well as French legal framework to recognize cooperative ownership.

In France, removal of residential property from the speculation-ridden real estate market has been an important benefit of co-housing.

Excellent point, heavenhappens. In my experience, this is the best part of people who are most effective assuming control of important aspects of their life – such as housing. You can be pretty sure, safety will be a much higher priority than for a corporation that is merely providing housing to collect the profits it creates.

As a peer advocate in homeless struggle, peer-run co-housing is also my preferred strategy for helping to address the diverse interconnected issues homeless populations face.

The power of peer support that can happen in a co-operative house, organized/built and run by people with shared struggle, is just as(if not more) important as the housing itself, to help address related issues that lead to and/or maintain homelessness.

It sounds like we’re pretty much on the same page with this, Mocking. Cohousing is one of the best exercises in direct democracy I know. So are savings pools. Here in New Zealand we have several – enabling many of us to lend and borrow money without being exploited by banks.